Friday, December 16, 2011

If you have a lot of books in electronic form and want to port them to Kindle and then manage them well, here are a few tools you will find very useful.

Use caliber or mobipocket creator to convert books from their current formats to Kindle format. In fact caliber can even transfer them properly to the Kindle for you. I know that a similar conversion can easily be achieved by sending the file to your Amazon Kindle email id and then receiving it when you are connected to Wi-Fi. However, I personally prefer to be in control of this process and I like to use caliber.

Then use Kindle Collection Manager to create collections of books and organize your books in them. As the books get organized in collection which are nothing but a form of folders, the list of books you see in the home screen of Kindle becomes a bit smaller and more logically organized.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

It was recently discovered that many Android, iOS, Nokia and RIM phones may have Carrier IQ mobile diagnostics rootkit software embedded deep into the software. The implication of this is that it is possible to track a lot more than just your problems with the phone without your even getting a whiff of it! Read more about this rootkit on website of Trevor Eckhart who is credited with finding this.

You can download the android app written by him to check whether your phone has Carrier IQ running behind your back.

To remove it, you can get the key for the Pro version for $1 from the android market but there are no guaranties that it will work for sure. Surest solution is to root your phone and go in for custom roms like CyanogenMod.

If you are on iOS5, it is simpler to disable this by going into Settings > General > About > Diagnostics & Usage, and click "Don’t Send.". For older versions of iOS running on jailbroken devices, go to chpwn blog.